SMU-in-Taos Summer 2018 Colloquium Series

Join us every Tuesday evening during the summer at 7pm in the Dining Hall of the beautiful SMU-in-Taos campus. Admission and parking are free to the public. Come, learn, and experience the wealth of knowledge and insight of leading minds in various fields!

SMU-in-Taos, Fort Burgwin is a multi-purpose educational facility owned by Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. The 423-acre campus is located approximately eight miles south of Taos on NM Highway 518.

DIRECTIONS TO OUR CAMPUS

From Taos, travel south on NM 518. Past Mile Marker 66, look for the SMU-in-Taos Fort Burgwin highway sign. Turn right onto campus through the second gate. Cross the bridge and turn right at the second intersection into the parking area, The Dining Hall will be on the right, and the Auditorium is located just north of the parking area.

Regents’ Professor Emeritus
Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona

Fire and People in Resilient Forest Ecosystems in New Mexico: The Long View From Tree-Rings and Archaeology

People have lived within forest landscapes of northern New Mexico for centuries. Droughts and wildfires have recurred many times, but ancestral Pueblo populations managed to live within these forests, with no known history of catastrophic fires destroying their villages. In recent decades, however, very large and high intensity wildfires are burning over these landscapes and the ruins of ancestral villages, as well as in modern housing developments. How did Puebloan people live within fire-prone landscapes at relatively high population densities for centuries in what was essentially a sustainable human-natural system? We have attempted to answer this question In the Jemez Mountains with an inter-disciplinary research team of tree-ring scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists, ecological modelers, education and outreach specialists. In this presentation I will focus on findings from our tree-ring studies of fire, climate and forest dynamics, along with archaeological research aimed at reconstructing human population changes over the past 400 years. Although the past is not a perfect guide for the future, the history of people, forests and fires in the Jemez Mountains provides useful insights for restoring and living within resilient forest landscapes today.